pet connection

The preview for the Oprah puppy mill show is fantastic! Looks like she’s really going to expose these horrible puppy factories. Way to go!

Check it out and then tell us what you thought of the show after.

And add your favorite links to more information on this issue, too.

Here’s Oprah’s list of resources and here’s her message board link.

I won’t see the show for hours here on the West Coast, since it’s on just before the evening news in my area.

And in the credit where credit is due department, check out the resources at The Humane Society of the United States. They have always, always been in the forefront of investigating and exposing puppy mills, all the way back to a 1962 Life magazine expose — “Not Fit for a Dog.” In the 1980s, the courageous Bob Baker of the HSUS exposed puppy mills, leading to the passage of “puppy lemon laws” in many states.

The “you’re either with us or agin’ us” stuff that makes me crazy: John Yates, writing for the American Sporting Dog Alliance:

Dog owners might be in for another bashing on Friday, when ultra-liberal talk show host Oprah Winfrey does a special program on “puppy mills.” Winfrey’s star reporter, Lisa Ling, went undercover in commercial breeding kennels to do an expose on the pet store trade.

Although the commercial trade in pet store puppies has nothing to do with the vast majority of dog owners and breeders, sensationalistic news coverage tars us with the same brush. To the liberal animal rights mindset, all breeders are either “puppy mills” or “backyard breeders,” and this always translates into more laws that harm only the innocent. Moreover, the hidden agenda of the animal rights movement is the ultimate elimination of animal ownership, and their strategy is to pick us off one group at a time.

Wow, here I am threatened by PETA one week, and calling BS on a hunting-dog advocacy group the next. I refuse to give puppy mills a free pass because I just happen to be on the same side as animal advocacy groups on this one. I want to see the end of commercial puppy factories. But I’m also against breeding bans, and I’m also against gun control.

Many animal activists do believe “a breeder is a breeder is a breeder” and that all are scum. But that has nothing to do with “liberals,” and I know all kinds of people who vote all kinds of ways on other issues who don’t understand the distinctions between a clueless, greedhead backyard breeder, a commercial puppy factory and reputable breeder.

Instead of slinging insults and jumping in bed with the puppy-millers, why not fight this battle with the truth?

If Oprah can keep some ninny from pulling out a credit card to get a puppy-mill purse dog, I’m all for it. And then those who believe in ethical, responsible breeding can make our own point.

Has Oprah fallen for the “a breeder is a breeder is a breeder and all are scum” lie?

On the verge of her show exposing puppy mills (Friday, check your listings), she says all her dogs will now come from shelters. Great, we love it.

But:

“I would never, ever adopt another pet now without going to a shelter to do it. I am a changed woman after seeing this show,” she told the AP. More:

Oprah Winfrey plans to dedicate a show investigating abuses at puppy mills to her cocker spaniel, Sophie, who died last month from kidney failure.

“Sophie gave me 13 years of unconditional love. She was a true love in my life,” Winfrey says on the broadcast scheduled to air Friday. (Advance remarks from the show were released Tuesday by Harpo Productions.)

While Sophie was not a product of a puppy mill, and Winfrey’s three current dogs were adopted from breeders, Winfrey says in the future she would look to adopt from an animal shelter.

Hmmmm.

Oprah, girlfriend: There is a huge difference between the cruelties of puppy mills and the work of responsible, ethical breeders. There is a huge difference between even a “model” commercial U.S.D.A. licensed mass-production puppy factory and the work of responsible, ethical breeders. There is a huge difference between the clueless, greedhead backyard breeder and the work of responsible, ethical breeders.

You’re a smart girl: Learn the issues. And then go to a shelter and adopt if that’s what you want. There are lots of great pets there, no lie, and we’re all for it. But don’t use your power to help the animal rights forces nick away at pet ownership one piece at a time until they’ve eliminated all “domesticated companion animals.”

Watch the show, everyone. And then let her know what you think.

We can always hope so!

Best Friends reports (thanks,Kathleen) that this Friday (check for local times), Oprah will do a show on puppy-mills, those cruel mass-production facilities that treat pets like factory-farmed livestock (which is sick enough for livestock!) and sell their often sick, unsocialized and often impossible to house-trained puppies through retail pet stores and Internet sites. (Why would these puppies by so difficult to house-train, you ask? Because they grow up ankle-deep in their own mess, and come to think of that as normal.)

But the puppies get out of the living hell of the mills. Their parents never do. They are bred again and again and again, until they can’t be bred any more. And then they’re auctioned off, or even killed and fed back to the other dogs.

Yes, this is the cruelty you’re often supporting when you buy a pet-store puppy. Read Dr. Patty Khuly, on what a good veterinarian thinks of this situation:

How horrible must it be to live 3/4 of your life in a glorified duffel bag? Not to mention the real crime: being born.

Teacups are big business. While undoubtedly cute and often surprisingly good-natured, most owners don’t know the trouble that goes into crafting these hamster-sized dogs.

For each pup conceived, we’ll never know the percentage that makes it to market. But I’d wager it’s not even 10%. Now you know the real reason for the $1000 minimum on these pups (in Miami the average is more like $1500). Supply and demand. (I didn’t go to business school for nothing, though my Wharton classmates might argue to the contrary.)

I could go on for a long time in this vein. The only other subject that gets me going quite so hotly is the sale of these teacup pups in retail outlets designed to lure the fashionable and uneducated (human traits not mutually exclusive, I’d hasten to opine).

As you probably already suspect, the puppy mill industry and puppy retailers are in cahoots. Sometimes, they are one and the same—vertically integrated, as it were. More often, a network of ambitious backyard breeders or faraway mill-style operation is behind the pristine storefronts on fashionable streets hawking pups at the rate of its other retailers` Gucci knockoffs.

Teacups bred in these conditions are not only intrinsically sickly for their teeny-tininess, they are often housed in unfriendly environments (among their many pseudo-brethren) in cost-effective conditions.

And here’s what Christie has written for her Your Whole Pet column on the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com Web site:

Seeing a golden retriever so scared of people that she shakes is sobering for anyone familiar with the breed’s usually happy-go-lucky, ball-chasing, people-loving nature. But Sunshine had reason to be afraid: Until that day, she’d spent her entire life inside a wire cage, pumping out puppies for the puppy-mill trade.

Puppy mills are the factory farms of dog breeding, big commercial operations that produce puppies that are then distributed nationwide to pet stores and sold directly to consumers on the Web. The dogs are kept in small cages — which USDA regulations require to be no more than a few inches bigger than the dog — and females have puppies every time they come in season for their entire lives.

The commercial mass breeding of dogs is not illegal, underground or small scale. Stephanie Shain, the outreach director of the Humane Society of the United States, says that of the 7 to 9 million dogs acquired in this country each year, between 2 and 4 million come from puppy mills. Pet Industry Joint Advisory Council figures suggest that around 300,000 to 400,000 puppies are sold in pet stores annually — a figure HSUS puts at closer to 500,000. A report from the American Veterinary Medical Association indicated that more than 200,000 American families bought puppies online in 2004.

I’ll be watching Oprah (I usually TiVo it). I hope a lot of people who are even now thinking about buying a puppy from an puppy-mill outlet or Internet site will be watching, too.

People who buy these dogs are the reason this cruelty continues. The only way to stop puppy mills is to stop buying the puppies.

Oprah, tell it like it is.  And we’re sorry about Sophie. Save some dogs in her sweet memory.

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Elsewhere: Mutts blogger John Woestendiek alllllmost gets taken in by a pet-related April Fool’s joke. Your laugh for the day.  Me, I already got taken in once. But I’m not ‘fessing up. … Lance Mackey’s Zorro is expected to recover, but will likely never race again. The idiot who ran into Mackey’s team with a snowmobile had come forward. Turns out — what a surprise! — “alchohol was involved.” … When I first read the headline that Switzerland was to ban cat fur products, I figured the ban was would be on the importing of such things. But no: In Switzerland is is currently legal to hunt cats and sell their hides. Ugh. Story here.

TGIF doesn’t mean much to me. We’re on book deadline here, I might have mentioned a time or two.

The good news: The stories for these new books are knock-your-socks-off fantastic. I am loving reading the wonderful stories people have sent us of how animals make our lives better. (And hey… there’s still a few days left to write one, if you have a story to tell. Don’t send it to us here at the Pet Connection, though: Click on the submission link on the site.)

I don’t know when Christie is flying to Austin for South By Southwest… but if it was last night I wonder if she got there on time. If she went SFO through Dallas (instead of taking the Nerd Bird direct from San Jose to Austin), she may well have had a diversion or delay. Hope she packed warm clothes, too. My friends outside of Austin said last night was freezin’.

Yesterday, I decided I travel too much. This, after explaining to a co-worker who’s taking her family to San Diego for spring break what parking garage to use at the Sacramento airport, what floor and even what row, and how to get through security and Starbucks lines more efficiently. And then I told her three kid-friendly activities in San Diego that are not to be missed, especially the tour of the USS Midway. Never too young to have children learn something about respect for hard work, duty and sacrifice.

Speaking of hard work … Christie left me blog-fodder, what a trouper. (more…)

Here’s yet another chapter in the saga of my ongoing love/hate relationship with the American Kennel Club. Yesterday, some folks thought I was the spawn of Satan for saying nice things about them, but today? Not so much.

Five years ago, it looked to a lot of people in the purebred dog world as though the AKC board had decided if they couldn’t beat the puppy mills, they’d join them. From an excellent article in the new issue of the Canine Chronicle, written by Gretchen Bernardi:

In 2000, the AKC was in the midst of a crisis. The cash cow was drying up, due, in large part, to the boycott of the AKC registry by the commercial breeders in Missouri, spearheaded by Missouri Pet Breeders in March of that year. The back-breaking straw in this scenario was the newly implemented Fre-quently Used Sire program. What was the AKC thinking? First, it institutes a policy requiring minimum standards of care and now it wants to ensure the parentage of the dogs in its registry.

So this particular camel, wanting to be out from under the yoke of more inspections and more requirements, moved most of its registrations to a little-known registry in Arkansas – American Pet Registry, Inc. Actually, that organization and its breeders were visionaries. They had been told repeatedly that without AKC registration papers their dogs were worth very little and that the American public wanted, actually de-manded, those papers. Until then, only the United Kennel Club and the American Kennel Club controlled the puppy paper market and the AKC certainly held the lion’s share of that market.

But soon everyone realized that people who bought their puppies in the pet stores didn’t care who printed the paper that accompanied those dogs and APRI is now one of the four or five major registration entities in the country. From its website: “The nation’s only pet registration service dedicated to the preservation and promotion of pet ownership and the professional pet industry.” It has subsequently merged with Academic Kennel Records and American Breeders Association, among others.

Unable to distinguish itself as the premier registry that we know it is, the AKC found its registrations in serious decline. We have all been bombarded with this news, but suffice it to say that in six years – from 1999 through 2006 – AKC registrations dropped by 249,428 dogs and 113,066 litters. Those figures are even more significant for our discussion than a simple formula of number of dogs registered times registration fees, since most of the commercially-bred puppies are sold with at least one supplemental transfer fee. During the initial, dramatic drop in these registrations, an officer of the AKC stood before the delegate body and said that although we had lost a significant chunk of the commercial breeders, we really “don’t need the puppy mill dogs.” But someone clearly thought we did.

Bernardi goes on to list each recommendation of the committee, and points out that the AKC has implemented none of those aimed at “raising the bar” of what the AKC is and what AKC registration stands for, but only those designed to, as she says, “sanitize” commercial dog breeding:

AKC became a platinum member of the Missouri Pet Breeders, the very organization which launched the boycott. AKC removed the “do not buy puppies from a pet shop” from its website. Andrew Hunte, founder of the Hunte Corporation, was invited to sit in the VIP section at the Invitational and in the AKC box at Westminster. AKC entered into and then backed out of an undisclosed contractual arrangement with Petland. AKC offered quickly expiring discount registration coupons clearly aimed at the most frequent breeders.

In August, the board unanimously passed a resolution, with directors Patty Haines and Bill Newman abstaining, “to direct management to aggressively pursue the registration of every AKC registerable dog and to actively welcome any breeder or owner who is willing to abide by all AKC rules, regulations, and policies”.

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In the end, what am I to think of the good work carried on by this committee and the thoughtful recommendations it made to the AKC board? More importantly, what am I to think of the AKC board and staff that, five years later, have addressed those recommendations that abide by its current philosophy of pursuing commercially-bred registrations in the absence of “raising the bar” and has ignored those that eight of the nine committee members thought would do just that and thereby enhance the name AKC.

At the creation of the committee, its critics said that it was formed to sanitize the commercial breeding industry and that “high volume breeder” was simply a euphimism for puppy mills. I disagreed with that assessment when the committee began its deliberations five years ago, but to my everlasting shame, I think they were wiser than I.

It’s an excellent, thought provoking read, and it’s here.